My coaching word for this week is ‘perseverance’. I heard Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson talking about the attributes that make a good coach and that was the first one he named – and having been manager of Manchester United for 25 years, he’s likely to know!
Within a few days, I had experienced why this is such an important part of a coach’s toolkit. I was trying out a new session for my Under-10s, an exercise that uses movement, coordination, passing, receiving and sprinting – you’ll see it in Soccer Coach Weekly in a couple of weeks.
I know sometimes when directing exercises with young players in front of their parents it can be a bit awkward for you, particularly if the players don’t understand immediately what it is they have to do. I ran the exercise a couple of times and it was not going well. It needed some fine tuning and a few re-run demonstrations for the players to understand what I wanted.
It was eating into my coaching time but I thought it was worth persevering with it. After 10 minutes they were still struggling but suddenly one of the players shouted “got it, Dave!” Instinctively, he showed the others how it worked. And with demonstrations from both of us, the whole squad got the hang of it. It still took time to really get things motoring, but we played the exercise for the next 20 minutes and I took notes on how to change it… how to make it easier to understand for my Soccer Coach Weekly readers.
It had worked in the end but only because I was prepared to persevere with the session, and thanks in no small part to some visual aids and a player who could help me to show the others how to do it. After the session, a coach from one of our other teams (who had caught the final 10 minutes) came up and told me what a great session it was.
Rest assured he wouldn’t have said that at the start, but as a group we persevered,